Best photos of 2018

National Geographic's 100 best images of the year—curated from 107 photographers, 119 stories, and more than two million photographs.

Photograph by BRIAN SKERRY

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Off the north coast of Canada’s Baffin Island, a June sun transforms snow and ice into limpid pools of turquoise. The Arctic’s perennial sea ice cover—the ice that survives the summer melt season—has shrunk dramatically.

National Geographic's 100 best images of the year—curated from 107 photographers, 119 stories, and more than two million photographs.

Sarah Leen has a job most people in the world would envy. She looks at photographs for a living. And not just any photographs — National Geographic photographs. As our Director of Photography, Leen estimates she has looked at as many images “as there are stars in the sky,” so it’s hard to narrow down her favorites. But she does that every year — here are her favorite 100 of the over two million submitted to us this year, in no particular order.

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These Maasai drive cattle and sheep from their village into Masai Mara reserve, reducing forage for wildlife hunted by lions and hyenas. The predators kill livestock, and herders retaliate by poisoning carcasses.

At night gray reef sharks hunt as a pack in the south channel of Fakarava Atoll, in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia. Photographer Laurent Ballesta’s team, diving without cages or weapons, counted 700 sharks.

Children in South Los Angeles celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, at a picnic co-sponsored by Islah LA, a Black Muslim community center. Led by Imam Jihad Saafir, the center works to promote community, education, and social and economic empowerment.

Moon jellies, found all over the world, are named for their otherworldly, translucent bells. The fringe of hairlike cilia sweeps food—mostly plankton—toward their mouths. The jellies change color depending on what they eat.

Members of the Palmer Society, a campus women’s organization, celebrate their graduation from Whittier College in California. The school—Richard Nixon’s alma mater—now ranks among the most diverse colleges in the United States, and the town of Whittier is predominantly Latino and increasingly affluent.

After sheets of clear plastic trash have been washed in the Buriganga River, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Noorjahan spreads them out to dry, turning them regularly— while also tending to her son, Momo. The plastic will eventually be sold to a recycler. Less than a fifth of all plastic gets recycled globally. In the U.S. it’s less than 10 percent.

Side by side with suburban housing just north of Kunming in Yunnan Province, these greenhouses grow high-value crops such as fruits and vegetables. In the relatively mild climate, crops are raised year-round.

Steeple Jason, one of the more remote islands in the Falkland Islands, hosts the world’s largest colony of black-browed albatrosses. Once used to graze hundreds of sheep and cattle, it’s now a nature reserve. About 70 percent of the black-browed albatross population nests in the Falklands.

Pincushion shrubs and shards of rock don’t trouble the puma known as Sarmiento, at center, or her 11-month-old cubs, huddled up at the end of a winter’s day above Lake Sarmiento, near Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park. The matriarch, who has raised several generations of cubs, spends most of her time hunting— and napping—along this waterfront.

From "The Pumas of Patagonia," December 2018

PHOTOGRAPH BY INGO ARNDT

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Two women revel at a Holi celebration in Richmond Hill, a Queens, New York, neighborhood popular with people of Indian descent from Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. During this Hindu holiday, which marks the arrival of spring and the victory of good over evil, festivalgoers smear one another with colored powder and paint.

Airaj Jilani, a retired oil-and-gas project manager from suburban Houston, performs as Elvis Presley. He has been a fan since he was a boy growing up in Pakistan. “I was the Elvis fan. My brother was the Beatles fan,” he says. In 1978 he visited Presley’s Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee; the following year he moved to Texas.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan (standing), whose family was born into India’s Dalit population, its lowest caste, shows her artwork to Shahana Hanif, a Bangladeshi American. Both women are activists who fight against religious intolerance and caste-based discrimination.

The Prom Queen, Cha'Leyah Fleming, a senior at Northwestern High School in Flint, Michigan, poses for a portrait at her 2018 Senior Prom Dance. 2018 is the last year Northwestern will hold prom. Next year the school will close and all the students in Flint will be consolidated into one high school. The decision to close the school was made because of decreased enrollment and an aging building.

Spring 2017 Spelman graduate Nanmanian Camara, an aspiring dentist, celebrates with her aunt, Mamata Soumah (left), and mother, Tenin Kaba. Camara’s Guinean family is proud of the first-generation American and college grad.

A vendor sells a drink made from sattu flour on a residential road in Kolkata, India. Formerly called Wood Street, the road was renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Sarani in 1986. India’s native son Mahatma Gandhi, who led a peaceful resistance against British colonialism, was “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change,” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., said. “Nonviolence is not sterile passivity,” King noted during the 1964 speech in which he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, “but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.”

Pedestrians watch a wedding party’s arrival at the Church of San Pedro Claver, in the historic district of Cartagena. The resort city’s Spanish colonial charms are a boon for tourism, which the government says has risen 250 percent in Colombia since 2006.

A couple enjoy afternoon tea at a luxury hotel in Shanghai with a view of the new financial district. As the Chinese become wealthier, their tastes are becoming more Western. The country is consuming more meat, dairy, and processed foods.

An airplane that drug lord Pablo Escobar used for smuggling cocaine adorns the entrance of Hacienda Nápoles. His once lavish estate is now a theme park with animal exhibits, waterslides, and dinosaur statues.

With the Sadlerochit Mountains rising in the distance, two muskoxen mosey through a scene devoid of the human touch. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of the largest protected areas in the U.S. and one of the wildest places left on Earth—at least for now.

King penguins stroll on the white sand of Volunteer Point on East Falkland island. Small numbers were seen in the islands in the 1860s, but in the 1970s the population began to increase steadily. A thousand breeding pairs now frequent the beach, which became a private reserve 50 years ago.

Benjamin Anderson floats on the north arm of Utah's Great Salt Lake. In the hypersaline water, he found it hard to sit up and hit the bottom in water only a foot deep. The lake’s salinity has increased as its volume has dropped nearly 50 percent since the mid-1800s. The water in the north arm is eight times as salty as the ocean.

Paralympian sprinter Jarryd Wallace’s bio­ mechanics are analyzed at the Southern Methodist University Locomotor Performance Laboratory in Dallas, Texas. “There was a lot I was doing wrong,” says Wallace, 28. The four­-time world record holder, whose lower right leg had to be amputated because of a muscle disorder, uses the lab’s analysis of his stride to run even faster.

Laura Sermeño and her baby boy celebrate the end of her cuarentena, or quarantine. The tradition, common throughout Latin America, requires new mothers to rest under the care of their relatives for some 40 days after childbirth. The period ends with a mother-child herbal bath and a massage.

One treasure still inside Utah's Bears Ears monument is Procession Panel, a nearly 23-foot-long rock carving, or petroglyph, on Comb Ridge. At least 1,000 years old, it depicts a ceremonial gathering of some 190 humanlike forms converging from four directions. A succession of prehistoric cultures occupied the mesas and canyons of southern Utah for more than 12,000 years.

Excavations at the site of a Native American town on Hatteras Island have yielded a mix of Indian and European artifacts, suggesting that some of the stranded colonists were adopted by the friendly Croatoan tribe.

Photograph by Mark Thiessen PHOTOGRAPHED WITH PERMISSION OF THE CROATOAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

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Licensed by the Israeli government to sell antiquities, Khader Baidun visits a storage room below one of his family’s shops in Jerusalem’s Old City. To help stop the sale of looted objects, dealers must now register artifacts in a digital database. But secrecy persists, one seller says. “It’s an old custom not to mention names or sums.”

From "The Bible Hunters," December 2018

Photograph by Paolo Verzone

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A conservator at the Israel Antiquities Authority prepares a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls for display. Seen here upside down, the fragile document is being placed between layers of mesh that are first pinned, then sewn together around the edges of the fragment.

From "The Bible Hunters," December 2018

Photograph by Paolo Verzone

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Hand copied around 1400, a Wycliffe New Testament on exhibit at a Christian theme park in Florida gets white-glove treatment. English theologian John Wycliffe championed translating the Bible from Latin into the common language, an innovation church officials denounced.

From "The Bible Hunters," December 2018

Photograph by Paolo Verzone VAN KAMPEN COLLECTION ON DISPLAY AT THE HOLY LAND EXPERIENCE, ORLANDO, FLORIDA

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Spotted jellies, which drift in South Pacific bays and lagoons, swim up during the day so that tiny plantlike organisms that live inside them and nourish them can catch the sun. The jellies don’t live off those symbionts alone, however. Their feathery arms are lined with stinging cells and mini-mouths that gobble animal plankton.

A spectral bat in a cage targets a laboratory mouse in leaf litter on a table. Scientists studying these carnivorous bats in Mexico haven’t yet seen them take prey in the wild, so they film them and record sounds related to the pursuit.

During an all-day courtship, Charqueado (at left), a four-year-old puma, pursues a female, gnashing his teeth and grunting. He mated with her five times over an hour and in a relatively exposed spot, according to photographer Ingo Arndt. Then, rather than retreating to safety, the pair strolled onto this promontory on private ranchland near Torres del Paine National Park.

From "The Pumas of Patagonia," December 2018

PHOTOGRAPH BY INGO ARNDT

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In the Falkland Islands, a male southern sea lion, about nine feet long and 800 pounds, looms over a female and two pups on an island informally known as Stick-in-the-Mud. The population declined in the mid-20th century when the animals were hunted and also had trouble finding food in a period of warm ocean temperatures. Now they’re the most abundant marine mammal in southern South America, with about 7,500 in the Falklands.

A female saker falcon guards her chicks—called eyases—in their nest overlooking the Mongolian plain. Genghis Khan is said to have kept hundreds of the birds for hunting. Today sakers are considered endangered because of habitat loss and the illegal wildlife trade.

In New Zealand's Chatham Islands, the most sheltered nesting site for albatrosses is a natural cave high up on Te Tara Koi Koia. Inside, nests protected from erosion from wind and rain form pedestals tall as top hats. The downy gray chicks will fledge in five months’ time.

Ellie, a northern goshawk owned by Lloyd and Rose Buck in England, tucks in her wings and streaks through narrow openings at high speed. Aeronautics scientists say the fierce predators assess the density of the trees and intuit how fast they can fly—ensuring that they’ll find openings and not crash.

Sea-worn stones form a path to beached and broken sea ice. Ice is central to life along the 800-mile Antarctic Peninsula, which juts up toward South America, but warming air and water are melting it on land and sea.

A sun star clings to tree kelp in the chilly South Atlantic off the coast of Bird Island in what looks like an underwater rain forest. The ridges that form the Falklands force nutrients up from the deep, creating a rich marine world that attracts all manner of fish, mammals, and birds.

After hitting the water at 60 miles an hour, plunge-diving Cape gannets feast on high-calorie sardines, their preferred prey. This photograph captures the first evidence (top) of underwater kleptoparasitism among Cape gannets: one bird caught heisting a fish from another.

Shreds of grouper flesh fall from the jaws of two sharks as they rip a fish apart. After hunting together to roust the grouper from its hiding place in the reef, the sharks encircle it—but then compete for the spoils.

A scalped gray-headed albatross chick on sub-Antarctic Marion Island gruesomely conveys the threat seabirds face from invasive species. For reasons not entirely understood, mice brought to the island by humans 200 years ago have begun feeding on birds at night. With no instinctual fear of this new danger, a bird will sit passively while mice nibble into its flesh, until it succumbs.

After lying in wait behind a wall of shrubs for an hour—then stalking her prey over a hundred yards of rough grassland for another half hour— Sarmiento leaps upon a guanaco. A strong and mature male, he moves sideways, escaping his sharpclawed foe.

From "The Pumas of Patagonia," December 2018

PHOTOGRAPH BY INGO ARNDT

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A young male lion was one of three members of Kenya’s famous Marsh Pride to die in 2015 after eating a cow carcass that Maasai herders had laced with carbosulfan, an insecticide. The lions had killed several cows.

A Maasai girl bounces on the carcass of a 52-year-old female elephant near Amboseli National Park, which is hemmed by farms. Rangers suspect the elephant was poisoned for raiding grain stores and removed her tusks.

Picasso’s love of bullfighting stemmed from childhood visits to the Plaza de Toros de la Malagueta in Málaga, Spain, where young people train and fight today. Picadors and bulls are a recurring motif in his work, as is the half-man, half-bull Minotaur.

Near the eastern end of the inhabited Wakhan corridor in Afghanistan, where roads dwindle to footpaths, a girl twists the tail of the family cow to hurry it toward their home in the village of Nishtkhowr.

Five Awá families from Posto Awá, an outpost created by the Brazilian government’s indigenous affairs agency, set out on an overnight excursion into the forest. Awá like them who live in settled communities and miss the forest—especially older members who grew up there—make these forays to reconnect with their traditional ways. It wasn’t until 1987 that Brazil began its current no-contact policy for isolated indigenous groups.

Anor Gul, six, at left, and Gul Shira, seven, head out to join other children gathering wood, one of their many chores. They’re surrounded by sea buckthorn, a fast-growing bush used for fuel and to build animal pens.

Marcia (left) and Millie Biggs, both 11, say people are shocked to learn that they’re fraternal twins. Marcia looks more like their mother, who’s English born, and Millie looks more like their father, who’s of Jamaican descent.

Baljeet Singh and his older son, Raza, at their home in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood. Baljeet works in Silicon Valley at Google Maps, as a head of product development. California has the largest South Asian population in the U.S., and within this population there are many Sikhs, from the region of Punjab.

Latinos came to Wilder, Idaho, as migrant farmworkers in the second half of the 20th century; today they’re 76 percent of the population. Miguel Arredondo arrived in 1972 and still has his first American car, this scarred Chevy. His grandkids also live in Wilder; the bouncy castle is for their baptism celebration. Guests include Santiago Rojero and his son, Santiago Jr.

Jumana Mussa, Dana Mussa, Jana Hassan, and Marya Tailakh, Girl Scouts from Troop 3408 in Anaheim, California, perform an anti-bullying skit at a public library. Bullying of Muslim children in the United States is rising largely because of cultural and religious misunderstanding, according to an institute that studies issues affecting Muslims.

In the village of Qalahye Panjah, in Afganistan's Wakhan corridor, Wakhi women prepare food to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice. The women are passing bowls of traditional "bat," a mixture of flour, water, butter, and salt.

Yasmin Morales Torres, 41, washes laundry by hand in her yard in Playa El Negro, a neighborhood in the town of Yabucoa in Puerto Rico. As of March the area had still been without power since the storm.

Reza Manafzadeh works on a fruit-tree farm at the edge of Iran's Lake Urmia, a salt lake where crops are irrigated by a new method—recycled factory water brought by tanker truck. “I’m so worried about my son’s future,” he says. “If there will be no water in Iran, our children will lose interest in their country.”

Leyla Sonkuş picks grape leaves on the Plain of Harran in southern Turkey, not far from the Syrian border. People in Syria and Iraq complain that Turkey’s dams threaten water flows from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, endangering farmlands and the supply of clean drinking water.

The Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti holds the record for the second longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a woman, having spent 199 days on the International Space Station in 2015. (NASA’s Peggy Whitson topped that record by almost a hundred days in 2017.) The longer she was in orbit, Cristoforetti says, the more her perception of humanity’s time on Earth evolved. When the massive geologic forces that have sculpted the planet are visible at a glance, the eons in which we crafted pyramids and skyscrapers become nearly indistinguishable. It’s as if, from her vantage point, all our constructed monuments arose overnight.

Before Katie Stubblefield had a face transplant, she posed for this portrait. It shows her severely injured face—but photographer Maggie Steber also wanted to capture “her inner beauty and her pride and determination.”

Taking advantage of a sunny spring day a year before Katie Stubblefield's face transplant, Katie and her parents, Robb and Alesia Stubblefield, indulge in a nap in a park near the Cleveland Clinic. With Katie in a wheelchair, the three explored the park, wandering amid blossoming trees and singing birds. The outing came after Katie had spent a month in the hospital. To reposition her eyes, she had surgery to implant what’s known as a distraction device. In the three years before her transplant, Katie was hospitalized more than a dozen times.

Sixteen hours into a transplant operation at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, surgeons finish the intricate task of removing the face from an organ donor. Awed by the sight and by the gravity of their work, the team falls suddenly silent as staff members document the face in between its two lives. The surgeons would spend 15 more hours attaching the face to Katie Stubblefield.

Determined to help their daughter live a life as normal and valuable as possible, Robb and Alesia put their own lives on hold for more than four years after Katie's face transplant. Pushing through exhaustion, relying on their faith in God, they accompany their daughter to endless appointments and therapy sessions. They’re already looking into ways to improve Katie’s vision, including the possibility of eye transplants. They expect to remain in Cleveland near the clinic and Katie’s doctors for the near future.

In Sweden hundreds of immigrant children whose families face deportation have contracted resignation syndrome, a baffling disorder in which the child withdraws from the world, won’t react even to painful stimuli, and must be nourished with a feeding tube— sometimes for years. “She is not suffering now,” physician Elisabeth Hultcrantz says of Leyla Ahmed, 10, a Syrian refugee.

Althea Tolidanes, eight, watches videos amid gifts of sheets, pillows, and curtains from her father, Arjay, who works at a burger joint in Saudi Arabia. Such gifts are sent to make up for long absences. But Althea says she doesn’t want to go to school, so that her father can come home and not have to earn money for school fees.

From "Heroes of the Philippines," December 2018

Photograph by HANNAH REYES MORALES

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Cadets at a merchant marine academy near Manila train for one of the most prestigious jobs for workers in the diaspora. Those who succeed are ensured a path to a middle-class life for their families. A quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines.

From "Heroes of the Philippines," December 2018

Photograph by HANNAH REYES MORALES

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About 20,000 Muslims attended a morning prayer last year at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California, to celebrate Eid al-Fitr. Muslims often dress up in their finest clothes on the holiday. The prayer marks the start of three days of celebrating and eating. In the U.S. the holiday is not typically recognized by employers or schools, so most Muslims must take time off to celebrate.

Freshmen enter the Morehouse College chapel named for Martin Luther King, Jr., whose words are etched on the wall. The all-male college aims to develop disciplined men who will lead lives of scholarship and service.

In the Wakhan corridor, Sidol (left), Jumagul (center), and Assan Khan (right) return on their yaks after monitoring the growth of grasses at lower elevations. Herds will be kept off that pasture so the grasses can be harvested, dried, and used by the Wakhi people for animal fodder in the winter months.

Coats fresh from molting, a column of macaroni penguins trudges up the ridge of an old volcano crater on sub-Antarctic Marion Island. Behind them is “the Amphitheatre,” a series of terraces in the crater worn down over eons by nesting and molting macaronis. “The sound of all the penguins reverberating from this multitiered half crater is really impressive,” says ecologist Otto Whitehead.

During breeding season, 150,000 gannets throng Scotland's Bass Rock island in the Firth of Forth. In winter the birds decamp south as far as West Africa. To make this image, photographer Stephen Wilkes and an assistant lugged his gear 122 steps uphill and set up near the ruins of a church about six feet from the nesting birds. Standing on the rocky ground for 28 sleepless hours, he took 1,176 photos. “It’s like a meditative state,” he says. “I’m alert to everything. I’m seeing everything.” He selected about 150 photos to make this image.

Photograph by Tim Laman This article was produced in collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

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A goliath birdwing hatches in the kitchen of a tourist house in West Papua, Indonesia. Hatchlings are killed young, to preserve their wings. The trade in rare butterflies— both legal and illegal— spans the planet, from catchers to middlemen to collectors.

A polar bear and her cubs explore a spit of land projecting into the Beaufort Sea, waiting for the water to freeze enough so they can hunt seals—their main food source. The loss of sea ice caused by a rapidly warming climate has forced polar bears to scrounge for scraps onshore and has reduced the southern Beaufort population by 40 percent.

Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, wowed YouTube fans—and neuroscientists—when he rocked in time to the Backstreet Boys’ tune “Everybody” in 2007. He lives at Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service, a sanctuary in South Carolina, where director Irena Schulz cares for him and records his dances.

The bed of Bolivia's dry, salt-crusted Lake Poopó unfurls into the distance. Boats are stranded; the fish and waterfowl are gone. Fishermen who depended on the lake are moving elsewhere. It’s a diaspora born of drought.

Pants made of polar bear fur identify Naimanngitsoq Kristiansen, an Inuit man from Qaanaaq in northwestern Greenland, as a seasoned hunter. With sea ice thinning every year, his dogsled journeys have grown increasingly hazardous.

Resting in his bunk on the U.S.S. Paul Hamilton, a sailor wears light-emitting goggles for a short time after waking. Nita Shattuck of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, is testing the devices to see if they can reset sailors’ internal clocks, synchronizing them with work shifts rather than the sun cycle.

Wile, the seven year-old son of photographer Magnus Wennman, watches cartoons on his iPad— a modern bedtime ritual for some. The stimulation may drive off sleep, but so does the backlit screen: Light at night inhibits the production of melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate our daily biological rhythms.

At Checkpoint 300 near Bethlehem, Palestinians from the West Bank, some climbing the walls to cut the line, wait to be cleared for entry into Israel. Thousands of workers endure the daily ordeal in exchange for better paying work in Israel. Disparities in economic opportunity often reinforce divisions based on religion, ethnicity, or rival territorial claims.

Farzan Sheikh, then 16, was shot in the left eye by an Indian policeman with a pellet gun on March 28, 2017. It happened in his neighborhood in Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir. Sheikh was an unwitting victim again last August, when pellets blinded his right eye. “He moves with the memory of the house,” says his mother, Muzamil.

In Khuzestan Province, Masoumeh Ahmadi, 14, holds her mother’s shotgun. After a woman marries, she receives a firearm—with the approval of her husband and her father. Many women get one as a gift from their husbands after giving birth to their first son.

On October 1, 2017, firing from the 32nd floor of a hotel, a man armed with semiautomatic rifles, modified to fire faster, rained more than a thousand rounds on a music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. Fifty-eight people were killed and 546 were injured. Public mass shootings have become much more frequent since 2011.

On a Portland commuter train Micah Fletcher and two other men defended two women—one wearing a hijab—from a man spewing anti-Muslim abuse. The assailant stabbed all three men. Two died, and Fletcher suffered a deep neck wound. He said he instinctively stepped in to help the women. Diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum as a child, he was bullied and beaten. “If you are truly a community, then everybody should be expected to stand up for one another,” he says.

Woodrow Vereen, Jr.'s two young sons were riding with him when he was stopped and searched by police for running a yellow light in Connecticut. He won a cash settlement after suing police over the illegal search and now struggles with what to tell his children about how to regard the police.

Morehouse College student government leaders John Cooper and Kamren Rollins paint a sign on campus to stimulate discussion about the N-word. Another student passes by wearing a T-shirt with an image of the late rap artist Tupac Shakur, who used the term liberally in his lyrics.

The Sanctuary in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, is an all-purpose community center that hosts free public events in a former church that was once home to a hundred-year-old Slovak parish. Two stars at the popular stunt-fighting smackdowns have created an act that makes sport of tensions between the old and the new Hazleton. With 16 years in the ring, Jason Dougherty wears a U.S. flag bandanna, while the reigning local champion, Marcelino Cabrera, sports trunks displaying the flag of the Dominican Republic. Dougherty helped train Cabrera, who moved to Hazleton when he was 15.

Felyssa Ricco stands outside the house in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her mother and stepfather, Kelly and Jesse Portanova. In addition to flying Old Glory and other flags, such as “Don’t Tread on Me,” the Portanovas sometimes fly the Confederate flag, saying it’s a way of standing up to those who believe it shouldn’t be displayed or who want to disregard America’s history.